Books like A new science of life by Rupert Sheldrake

Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book "What Is Life?" poses the question of how living organisms can be explained by physics and chemistry, introducing the concept of an aperiodic crystal that later inspired the discovery of DNA.

"Ellis's detailed drawings bring animals to life that have not been seen for 400 million years, some that rival science fiction monsters for sheer weirdness. Early crocodiles and turtles were three times larger than they are today: and there was once a manatee that was 30 feet long and had no bones below the elbow. There were the trilobites, jointed animals with complex eyes that dominated the seas for 200 million years and then completely disappeared: sharks with teeth on their backs: and others, 50 feet long, with teeth the size of your hand.". "Fifty million years ago, some land-dwelling mammals reentered the water and began the process of modification that turned them into whales. It was the most astonishing transformation in mammalian history. In Aquagenesis, you will track these changes and meet the paleontologists who have found the links between the terrestrial mammals and the first semiaquatic whales - creatures that probably looked like hyenas, huge shrews, or fat otters. Today the only animal on earth that regularly walk in an upright, two-legged stance are penguins and people. It is possible that our size, shape, stride, intelligence, and hair (or lack thereof) can also be explained by the provocative theory of the aquatic ape."--BOOK JACKET.

Rupert presents a balanced and logical presentation of how scientific thought began, describing its progress from the dawn of civilisations through the Renaissance, to modern-day empirical platitudes. He shows that both sides are manifestly wrong in their attempts at explaining what is truly observed in terms of behaviour and function. He concurrently presents an alternative argument based on morphic fields and the fact that everything any living thing does is recorded into these fields forever, to be called on whenever a resonance with a living member of that species occurs with these fields. For example, DNA does not explain why, amid the same protein building blocks, and DNA pattern in each cell, an embryo's arm grows differently to its leg. Morphic fields, however, remember how the blocks go together and exert an influence to survival-successful ends. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is superb and really eye-opening. For example, the parallelism between marsupial and placental mammals, shows how the same design, but with slight variations, can come about through universal morphic fields. It also leaves room for speculation as to how the morphic fields caused by this planet, match those on other life- supporting planets in the universe, and hence, how similar aliens might be to us. A really wonderful read, and one of my top books ever. The only slur I could truthfully level at it would be the tendency to drift off into religious connotations as a way of explaining the spirituality of a place. I think energy fields cluster around different bits of nature differently, and they resonate with us in unconsciously noticeable ways differently. Sometimes the resonance affects a whole species in such a way that a place can become important because of its "nice vibe", but it is actually the underlying contours of that bit of nature, that are making the human form happy, not some "godly spirit". First published 1991.

What is Life? explores how chemistry alone can give rise to the complex, self-maintaining properties of living systems, arguing that Darwinian evolution emerges from a fundamental chemical principle that links replicating molecules to complex life.

In the second edition of *Quantum Healing*, Deepak Chopra links modern science—medicine, neuroscience, and physics—to Ayurvedic insights, proposing that the mind’s intelligence can reshape physiology to counter illness and aging.